Her Unforgettable Royal Lover

by Merline Lovelace

  “Of course.” She twisted in her seat to keep the statue in view as they negotiated the narrow, curving streets that would take them down to the Danube. “He was one of the greatest military leaders of the seventeenth century. As I recall, he served three different Holy Roman Emperors and won a decisive victory against the Ottoman Turks in 1697 at…”

  She broke off, her eyes rounding. “Why do I know that?”

  She sank back against her seat and stared through the windshield at the tree-dappled street ahead. Dom said nothing while she struggled to jam together the pieces of the puzzle.

  “Why do I know the Hapsburgs built this palace on the site of the Gothic castle originally constructed by an earlier Holy Roman Emperor? Why do I know it was reconstructed after being razed to the ground during World War II?” Her fists bunched, drummed her thighs. “Why can I pull those details out of my head and not know who I am or how I ended up in the river?”

  “Recalling those details has to be a good sign. Maybe it means you’ll start to remember other things, as well.”

  “God, I hope so!”

  Her fists stayed tight through the remainder of the descent from Castle Hill and across the majestic Chain Bridge linking Buda and Pest.

  Their first stop was a small boutique, where Natalie traded Dom’s drawstring shorts, soccer shirt and flip-flops for sandals, slim designer jeans, a cap-sleeved tank in soft peach and a straw tote. A second stop garnered a few basic toiletries. Promising to shop for other necessities later, Dom hustled her back to the car for her appointment with Dr. Andras Kovacs.

  * * *

  The neurologist’s suite of offices occupied the second floor of a gracious nineteenth-century town house in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Basilica. The gray-haired receptionist in the outer office confirmed Natalie’s short-notice appointment, but showed more interest in her escort than the patient herself.

  “I read about you in the paper,” she exclaimed to Dom in Hungarian. “Aren’t you the Grand Duke of…of…something?”

  Swallowing a groan, he nodded. “Of Karlenburgh, but the title is an empty one. The duchy doesn’t exist any longer.”

  “Still, it must be very exciting to suddenly find yourself a duke.”

  “Yes, very. Is Dr. Kovacs running on time for his appointments?”

  “He is.” She beamed. “Please have a seat, Your Highness, and I’ll let his assistant know you and Ms. Clark are here.”

  When he led Natalie to a set of tall wingback chairs, she sent him a quick frown. “What was all that about?”

  “She was telling me about a story she’d read in the paper.”

  “I heard her say ‘Karlenburgh.’”

  He eyed her closely. “Do you recognize that name?”

  “You mentioned it this morning. I thought for a moment I knew it.” Still frowning, she scrubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. “It’s all here, somewhere in my head. That name. That place. You.”

  Her eyes lifted to his. She looked so accusing, he had to smile.

  “I can think of worse places to be than in your head, drágám.”

  He wasn’t sure whether it was the lazy smile or the casual endearment or the husky note to his voice that brought out the Natalie Clark he’d met in New York. Whatever the reason, she responded with a hint of her old, disapproving self.

  “You shouldn’t call me that. I’m not your sweetheart.”

  He couldn’t help himself. Lifting a hand, he brushed a knuckle over the curve of her cheek. “Ah, but we can change that, yes?”

  She pulled away, and Dom was cursing himself for the mix of wariness and confusion that came back to her face when a slim, thirtysomething woman in a white smock coat emerged from the inner sanctum.

  “Ms. Clark? I’m Dr. Kovacs’s assistant,” she said in Hungarian. “Would you and your husband please follow me?”

  “Ms. Clark is American,” Dom told her. “She doesn’t speak our language. And we’re not married.”

  “Oh, my apologies.”

  Switching to English, she repeated the invitation and advised Natalie it was her choice whether she wished to have her friend join her for the consult. Dom half expected her to refuse but she surprised him.

  “I’d better have someone with me who knows who I am.”

  The PA showed them to a consultation room lined with mahogany bookshelves displaying leather-bound volumes and marble busts. No desk, just high-backed wing chairs in Moroccan leather arranged around a marble-topped pedestal table. The physician fit his surroundings. Tall and lean, he boasted an aristocratic beak of a nose and kind eyes behind rimless glasses.

  “I reviewed the computer results of your examination at the hospital yesterday,” he told Natalie in flawless English. “I would have preferred a complete physical exam with diagnostic imaging and cognitive testing before consulting with you, of course. Despite the limited medical data available at this point, however, I doubt your memory loss resulted from an organic issue such as a stroke or brain tumor or dementia. That’s the good news.”

  Natalie’s breath hissed softly on the air. The sound made Dom reach for her hand.

  “What’s the bad?” she asked, her fingers closing around his.

  “Despite what you see in movies and on television, Ms. Clark, it’s very rare for persons suffering from amnestic syndrome to lose their self-identity. A head injury such as the one you sustained generally leads to confusion and problems remembering new information, not old.”

  “I’m starting to remember things.” Her fingers curled tighter, the nails digging into Dom’s palm. “Historical dates and facts and such.”

  “Good, that’s good. But for you to have blocked your sense of self…”

  Kovacs slid his rimless glasses to the tip of his nose. Dom found himself wondering again about Natalie’s glasses, but pushed the thought to the back of his mind as the doctor continued.

  “There’s another syndrome. It’s called psychogenic, or dissociative, amnesia. It can result from emotional shock or trauma, such as being a victim of rape or some other violent crime.”

  “I don’t think…” Her nails gouged deeper, sharper. “I don’t remember any…”

  “The hospital didn’t run a rape kit,” Dom said when she stumbled to a halt. “There was no reason to. Natalie—Ms. Clark—doesn’t have any defensive wounds or bruises other than the swelling at the base of her skull.”

  “I’m aware of that. And I’m not suggesting the trauma is necessarily recent. It could have happened weeks or months or years ago.” He turned back to Natalie. “The blow to your head may have triggered a memory of some previous painful experience. Perhaps caused you to throw up a defensive shield and block all personal memories.”

  “Will…” She swiped her tongue over her lower lip. “Will these personal memories come back?”

  “They do in most instances. Each case is so different, however, it’s impossible to predict a pattern.”

  Her jaw set. “So how do I pry open Pandora’s box? Are there drugs I should take? Mental exercises I can do?”

  “For now, I suggest you just give it a little time. You’re a visitor to Budapest, yes? Soak in the baths. Enjoy the opera. Stroll in our beautiful parks. Let your mind heal along with the injury to your head.”

  The neurologist’s parting advice didn’t sit well with Natalie.

  “Hit the opera,” she huffed as they exited the town house. “Soak in the baths. Easy for him to say!”

  “And easy for us to do.”

  The drawled comment brought her up short. Coming to a dead stop in the middle of the wide, tree-shaded sidewalk, she cocked her head.

  “How can you dawdle around Budapest with me? Don’t you have a job? An office or a brickyard or a butcher shop wondering where you are?”

  “I wish I worked in a butcher shop,” he replied, laughing. “I could keep the hound in bones for the rest of his life.”

  “Don’t dodge the question. Where do you work?”

 
; “Nowhere at the moment, thanks to you.”

  “Me?” A dozen wild possibilities raced through her head but none of them made any sense. “I don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.” He hooked a hand under her elbow and steered her toward a café a short distance away. “Come, let’s have a coffee and I’ll explain.”

  * * *

  If Budapest’s many thermal springs and public baths had made it a favorite European spa destination since Roman times, the city owed its centuries-old café culture to the Turks. Suleyman the Magnificent first introduced coffee to Europe when he invaded Hungary in the 1500s.

  Taste for the drink grew during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Meeting friends for coffee or just claiming a table to linger over a book or newspaper became a time-honored tradition. Although Vienna and other European cities developed their own thriving café cultures, Budapest remained its epicenter and at one time boasted more than six hundred kávébáz.

  Hungarians still loved to gather at cafés. Most were small places with a dozen or so marble-topped tables, serving the inevitable glass of water along with a pitcher of milk and a cup of coffee on a small silver tray. But a few of the more elegant nineteenth-century cafés still remained. The one Dom escorted Natalie to featured chandeliers dripping with Bohemian crystal and a monstrous brass coffeemaker that took up almost one whole wall.

  They claimed an outside table shaded by a green-and-white-striped awning. Dom placed the order, and Natalie waited only until they’d both stirred milk and sugar into their cups to pounce.

  “All right. Please explain why I’m responsible for you being currently unemployed.”

  “You uncovered a document in some dusty archives in Vienna. A codicil to the Edict of 1867, which granted certain rights to Hungarian nobles. The codicil specifically confirmed the title of Grand Duke of Karlenburgh to the house of St. Sebastian forever and in perpetuity. Does any of this strike a chord?”

  “That name. Karlenburgh. I know I know it.”

  “It was a small duchy, not much larger than Monaco, that straddled the present-day border between Austria and Hungary. The Alps cut right through it. Even today it’s a place of snow-capped peaks, fertile valleys and high mountain passes guarded by crumbling fortresses.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Several times. My grandfather was born at Karlenburgh Castle. It’s just a pile of rubble now, but Poppa took my parents, then my sister and me back to see it.”

  “Your grandfather was the Grand Duke?”

  “No, that was Sarah’s grandfather. Mine was his cousin.” Dom hesitated, thinking about the blood ties that had so recently and dramatically turned his life upside down. “I suppose my grandfather could have tried to claim the title when the last Grand Duke was executed.”

  He stirred his coffee again and tried to imagine those long ago days of terror and chaos.

  “From what he told me, that was a brutal time. The Soviet invasion leveled everyone—or elevated them, depending on how you looked at it—to the status of comrade. Wealth and titles became dangerous liabilities and made their holders targets. People tried to flee to the West. Neighbors spied on neighbors. Then, after the 1956 Uprising, the KGB rounded up thousands of nationalists. Charlotte, Sarah’s grandmother, was forced to witness her husband’s execution, and barely escaped Hungary with her life.”

  The history resonated somewhere in Natalie’s mind. She’d heard this story before. She knew she had. She just didn’t know how it connected her and the broad-shouldered man sitting across from her.

  “So this dusty document you say I uncovered? It links you to the title?”

  “Charlotte thinks it does. So, unfortunately, do the tabloids.” His mouth twisted. “They’ve been hounding me since news of that damned document surfaced.”

  “Well, excuse me for making you aware of your heritage!”

  His brows soared. He stared at her with such an arrested expression that she had to ask.

  “What?”

  “You said almost the same thing in New York. While you were tearing off a strip of my hide.”

  The revelation that she’d taken him down a peg or two did wonders for her self-confidence. “I’m sure you deserved it,” she said primly.

  This time he just laughed.

  “What?” she demanded again.

  “That’s you, drágám. So proper. So prissy. That’s the Natalie who made me ache to tumble her to the bed or a sofa and kiss the disapproval from those luscious lips. I hurt for an hour after I left you in New York.”

  Her jaw dropped. She couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe. Some distant corner of her mind warned that she would lose, and lose badly, if she engaged Dominic St. Sebastian in an exchange of sexual repartee.

  Yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Forcing a provocative smile, she leaned her elbows on the table and dropped her voice to the same husky murmur Dom had employed in Dr. Kovacs’s reception area.

  “Ah, but we can fix that, yes?”

  His blank astonishment shot her ego up another notch. For the first time since she’d come awake and found herself eye to eye with a grinning canine, Natalie was able to shelve her worry and confusion.

  The arrival of a waiter with their lunch allowed her to revel in the sensation awhile longer. Only after she’d forked down several bites of leafy greens and crunchy cucumber did she return to their original topic.

  “You still haven’t explained how inheriting the title associated with a long-defunct duchy put you on the rolls of the unemployed.”

  He swept the café with a casual glance. So casual she didn’t realize he was making sure no one was close enough to overhear until he delivered another jaw-dropper.

  “I’m an undercover agent, Natalie. Or I was until all this Grand Duke business hit.”

  “Like…?” She tried to get her head around it. “Like James Bond or something?”

  “Closer to something. After my face got splashed across the tabloids, my boss encouraged me to take a nice, long vacation.”

  “So that explains the drawer!”

  He leaned back in his chair. Slowly. Too slowly. Although the September sun warmed the cozy space under the awning and the exhaust from the cabs clogging the boulevard shimmered on the afternoon air, Natalie had the eerie sensation that the temperature around their table had dropped at least ten degrees.

  “What drawer?”

  “The locked one in your wardrobe. You store all your 007-type gadgets in there, don’t you? Poison pens and jet-propelled socks and laser-guided minimissiles?”

  He didn’t answer for several moments. When he did, her brief euphoria at being in control evaporated.

  “This isn’t about me, Nat. You’re the one with the empty spaces that need filling. Let’s finish our coffee, yes? Then we’ll swing by police headquarters. With any luck, they will have found the answers to at least some of your questions.”

  * * *

  Dom called before they left the café to make sure Officer Gradjnic, his partner or their supervisor would be available to speak with them. Natalie didn’t say a word during the short drive. Budapest traffic was nerve-racking enough to tie anyone in knots. The possibility that the police might lift a corner of the curtain blanketing her mind only added to her twist of nerves.

  The National Police Department occupied a multistory, glass-and-steel high-rise on the Pest side of the Danube. Command and control of nationwide operations filled the upper stories. The Budapest PD claimed the first two floors. Officer Gradjnic’s precinct was crammed into a corner of the second floor.

  Natalie remembered Gradjnic from yesterday. More or less. Enough to smile when he asked how she was feeling, anyway, and thank him for their help yesterday.

  “So, Ms. Clark. Do you remember how you ended up in the Danube?”

  “No.”

  “But you might, yes?”

  “The doctor we consulted this morning said that was possible.” She swiped her tongue over sud
denly dry lips. “What have you discovered?”

  “A little.”

  Computers sat on every desk in the office but Officer Gradjnic tugged out his leather notepad, licked his finger and flipped through the pages.

  “We’ve verified that you flew from Paris to Vienna last week,” he reported. “We’ve also learned that you rented a vehicle from the Europcar agency in Vienna three days ago. We had the car rental company retrieve the GPS data from the vehicle and discovered you crossed into Hungary at Pradzéc.”

  “Where’s Pradzéc?”

  “It’s a small village at the foot of the Alps, straddling the border between Austria and Hungary.”

  Her glance shot to Dom. They’d been talking about the border area less than an hour ago. He didn’t so much as flick an eyelid but she knew he’d made the connection, just as she had.

  “According to the GPS records, you spent several hours in that area, then returned to Vienna. The next day you crossed into Hungary again and stopped in Gyür. The vehicle is still there, Ms. Clark, parked at a tour dock on the Danube. We called the tour office and verified that a woman matching your description purchased a ticket for a day cruise to Budapest. Do you recall buying that ticket, Ms. Clark?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember boarding the tour boat? Watching the scenery as you cruised down the Danube, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged and closed his notebook. “Well, that’s all I have for you, I’m afraid. You’ll have to make arrangements to return the rental car.”

  Dom nodded. “We’ll take care of it. In the meantime, we’d like a copy of your report.”

  “Of course.”

  When they walked out into the afternoon sunshine, Natalie couldn’t wait to ask. “Was Győr part of the duchy of Karlenburgh?”

  “At one time.”

  “Is Karlenburgh Castle anywhere in that vicinity?”

  “It’s farther west, guarding a mountain pass. Or was. It’s just a pile of ruins now.”

  “I need to retrace my steps, Dominic. Maybe if I see the ruins or the towns or the countryside I drove through, I’ll remember why I was there.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow.”